Sciamma really seems to have fallen in love with the place, praising the local crew and how they made it a Bolivian film rather than one by a Spanish filmmaker. He also took care to mention that the altitude in Bolivia can really throw you for a loop: La Paz is the most altitudinous capital city in the world, 2km above sea level, so the air is thin and the deserts get far chillier than you would think just from looking at them. A beautiful country, by all accounts, but not for the weak of spirit.
The film would be back in town with French subtitles at the end of the week (now, if you're in Montreal), and has also been reworked into an artbook that was promoted in the closing credits, and it should be a good companion, considering just how much material is in the movie.
There might have technically been time to fit the Korean shorts package in at de Sève before crossing the street, but with everything running a few minutes late, but not the consistent same few minutes, I decided not to chance it, got some food, and then saw Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards in Hall (can't quite make the shift to Alumni Auditorium). Good fun.
And that's last Monday in the books. Tuesday would be Stinker, Sweetness, Peau à Peau, and Contact Lens. Today (the next Monday), I'll be at Transcending Dimensions, The Woman, Looking for an Angel, Hi-Five, and Kazakh Scary Tales, if all goes well.
Cielo
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
The filmmakers admitted to being concerned with aesthetic over story in the introduction, and there were times I felt it, down to having to more or less invent a theme that doesn't quite work to make elements palatable (see below). Still, Cielo ultimately worked in ways that this sort of contemporary South American fantasy film often doesn't work for me, finding a way for its flights of fantasy to bring me in rather than take me out.
It opens serenely, with seven-year-old Santa (Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda) sitting by a beautiful lake, before she catches and swallows a large goldfish. She walks back to the stone house her father is building, but what happens next is shocking, and soon she is on the road, pulling a cart with a large barrel on it, bound for the sea. She makes a trade for a truck with a priest (Luis Bredow), who probably didn't think she was going to drive away in it. That she only gets so far is more on the truck than her, but she'll soon be met by others, including a luchadora going by "La Reina" (Mariela Salaverry) and policeman Gustavo (Fernando Arze Echalar), thoroughly puzzled by the trail Santa has left behind.
The film is, if nothing else, gorgeous from start to finish. Director Alberto Sciamma and cinematographer Alex Metcalfe are certainly aided by finding great things to point a camera at, drawing upon the landscape without seeming to push into the fantastical. The film has one of the most beautiful opening shots you'll see, and whether Santa winds up in small towns, the desert, or the city, there are surprising compositions and delightful combinations of colors. These are also environments where people seem at home, with faces and costumes that seldom seem exaggerated.
Young lead Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda is also fantastic on her own, 8 years old and with the ability to play a magical, precocious child who seldom sounds like a teenager or like she's saying the words of an adult screenwriter trying to sound like a child. She's a confident kid who sells having a little girl's perspective on her unique experience, and it's why one believes she can accomplish miracles in this world; she never seems not part of it. There is authority covering warmth in the performances of the people she meets - men like Luis Bredow's priest and Fernando Arze Echalar's cop who maybe need someone as remarkable as Santa to unearth the decency between their world-weariness and women Mariela Salaverry's empathetic entertainer.
The story, though... Well, it very clearly follows the imagery of the idea for a scene, and I suspect that it's useful that the violent opening will mea some folks are just going to be out less than ten minutes in. Santa may be a wondrous enough girl that a found family coalesce around her, but to the extent it does, it is all on the performances. The story has the right shape and the cast sells it, but it's a framework, not something that one can dig into.
That's enough, for the most part. It's a great movie to look at with some great pieces, just all aesthetic and emotion as opposed to the sources of that emotion.
(The structure I found myself trying to impose on the film is that I think you've got to posit that this whole plan comes from a desperate mother who places too much weight on an 8-year-old, even one who can perform miracles, but it's not something the movie really examines. Maybe Gustavo recognizes that what Santa does is not truly her fault, but there are things a policeman has to do once the scene is discovered that are elided over.)
Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers
* * * (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Documentaries from the Edge, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)
Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers is firmly in the category of documentaries that I treat like an introductory university course, right down to taking three times as many notes as I normally would for a feature of its length. Obviously it's not even that, but it's a solid chunk of good information to get someone started on the topic.
As these things go, it is pretty darn solid. The filmmakers break things down into logical sections that touch upon the context of these artists' work without ever straying to the point of the film really being about something else, and get what seem to be fairly open, unguarded interviews with the surviving subjects. Even in the earlier sections of the film, where its roughly-chronological nature has them discussing the horrors of World War II and its aftermath, they tend to focus on it shaping them as opposed to releasing a lot of raw emotion, but they are the survivors who found outlets long ago.
Mostly, though, director Amélie Ravalec includes a ton of art - plenty enough to be a good sampler, with the narration relevant but not like someone standing behind your shoulder in a museum, explaining everything in detail rather than letting you experience it and make your own connections. Clearly, she feels, the best way to start to understand a work is to look at it, and while contextualization is useful, one's appreciation of a work must ultimately come from the work itself. It's overwhelming at times, though, with seemingly a new work to examine every minute (the citations part of the credits is long); the companion book is probably going to be great.
There's also a very nice soundtrack, not exactly recognizable needle drops to me, but reinforcing the energy of the period and movement(s) and providing a rhythm that keeps the film from feeling like either a fire hose of information or like it's waiting for you to catch up. It's a really nice presentation.
(Fair warning: There is a lot of bondage, enough to make you wonder if this is what caught the filmmaker's eye originally, with a section attempting to explain why there's so much after so much has gone by without much comment. By the end, it's more like a bit of an odd emphasis.)
Akabane Honeko no Bodyguard (Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Purchase the manga at Amazon
My friend Tony, who owns the local comic shop, often talks about how his son is into manga and anime but tends not to overlap them for the same property: If he reads the manga, he'll probably skip the anime, and vice versa. I don't know how the live-action adaptations tend to figure in for him, but I do find myself feeling the same way about them lately: As much as I dig movies like Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards and see where they've been compressed, I'm not sure I need to go back to the source material. This is fun but you can burn a lot of time getting the same story twice.
Honeko Adabane (Natsuki Deguchi) is an ambitious high school student - she's got dreams of being both a dancer and a lawyer like her parents - and not the sort who has a hundred-million dollar bounty placed upon her head. That's because her birth father is Masahito Jingu (Ken'ichi Endo), head of the Japanese equivalent of the CIA; he grabs roughneck Ibuki Arakuni (Raul Murakami), a childhood friend of Honeko's, off the street and asks him to be her bodyguard, although part of the job is making sure she is not aware of the forces attacking her. Ibuki agrees, but stumbles on his first attempt. Fortunately, Honeko's best friend and dance teammate Nei Toyega (Hikaru Takahashi) is also working for Jingu - as is all of class 3-4, led by dorky-looking Sumiko Somejima (Daiken Okudaira), and trained in various specialties since pre-school. But with the price on Honeko's head so high, will Somejima's "23 tarot cards" be enough?
Honeko Akabane's bodyguards definitely falls into the trap where folks adapting a manga have trouble fitting the whole story into a two hour movie - there's a spot where original manga-ka Masamitsu Nigatsu probably milked two or three cliffhangers in weekly serialization out of what's an annoying 5-minute delay here - even when you don't have 25 title characters. You could streamline the heck out of this, except that doing so would probably not just lose one of the most entertaining subplots, but the sheer excess of it is part of what makes it so much fun as the filmmakers frantically pile more on well past the point where they actually need to, a hilarious surprise if you're going in fairly blind and probably still entertaining for the sheer audacity of it if not.
It's pretty goofy all around, with some very winning performances in the center, particularly the very fun chemistry between Raul Murakami and Natsuki Deguchi who actually feel like opposites attracting; Murakami is great at suddenly dropping Ibuki's tough-guy pretenses to present a very affable doofus with a massive crush on Honeko, while Deguchi is good at catching how Honeko is smart, assertive, and kind of dorky (when it comes to the law) underneath the sort of pleasantness that can often read as bland. Ken'ichi Endo makes Jingu a funny character whom one can nevertheless believe is a wily spy master, and Tao Tsuchiya is a real delight swinging Masachika from genuinely dangerous villain to socially maladjusted weirdo and using the same backstory for each.
The filmmakers also find a good balance between using the premise for groan-worthy gags and good character based comedy, and there's style to spare. I presume the look is comic-accurate, and both the white-and-black school uniforms (with the assassins in all black a helpful inverse) and the slick outfits Masachika's crew sports. It's fun and poppy while still giving its weirdos room to be likable teenagers even amid the spy movie hijinks.
There's some fairly entertaining action, too: The filmmakers do a nice job blending slapstick with some actual danger, dedicated to keeping it hand to hand and selling that these spy kids might hold off a few professional assassins.
Not sold: Folks thinking Tao Tsuchiya's character is a guy. But, then, that's also a manga trope dialed up to the max, and that's what makes this movie work.
"The Traveler & The Troll"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
I don't know that writer/director Adam Murray is directly influenced by the late Jim Henson here - he could be young enough to have been born after Henson's passing - but his short hits a particular Henson vibe that maybe isn't represented as much among his successors as kid-friendly Muppets: A world where the macabre creatures are possessed of dry wit, moving about in such a way that a viewer can see that they are puppets but where the uncanniness makes them a little creepier. The effect is ultimately still comic, but with the lingering feeling that it could have been scary.
Instead, it's kind of charming, with the troll (voiced by Dave Child) demanding an answer to three riddles when the traveler (Erika Ishii) who has passed through his territory has no money, only to find that she really likes riddles and he's seldom had to actually pose three. It's a goofy little thing, but that sort of flipping the script from unnerving to amusing is a big part of this sort of piece's appeal.
Dieva suns (Dog of God)
N/A (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Dog of God has a hell of an opener, as its blindfolded werewolf protagonist squares off against a giant and rips its testicles off. It's metal as hell and brothers Lauris & Raitis Abele know how everything works together here, with grandiose physical acting enhanced by rotoscoped animation and a no-messing-around soundtrack, going for "hell yeah!" right away.
It falls off, though, and I found myself unable to hang with it much after that, whether because I was worn out from it being the last film of the day or because the story was pretty darn dull. There are audiences for nasty medieval fantasy where everyone is some degree of cruel or cynical, but it doesn't create a rooting interest in me, and later bits of violence struggled to match the operatic intensity of the opener.
Still, I'm not sure how I slept through so much of a movie this loud.
No comments:
Post a Comment